Is Leadership A Personality Or A Process?

What if the key to becoming a better leader isn't another leadership book, but a better leadership process?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson explains why leadership should be treated as a repeatable process instead of a personality trait. Drawing on decades of experience in process improvement and executive coaching, Ed reveals why telling leaders to "be more strategic" or "delegate more" rarely creates lasting change.

You'll learn how applying process improvement principles to leadership creates greater consistency, stronger teams, clearer expectations, and measurable results. Ed also introduces his practical framework, Explore, Clarify, Transform, and Master, to help leaders build repeatable habits that improve performance over time.

If you want to lead with greater intention, coach more effectively, and create lasting change in your organization, this episode will change the way you think about leadership.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

If you're leading a team and you feel stuck in chaos, conflict, or constant pressure, then Leadership SOP's podcast is for you. And here's your host, Ed Tyson.

Speaker 0:17

About 15 years ago, my landline rang out of the blue. I was a process improvement executive for a publicly traded healthcare company at the time. And the leader on the other end was calling because he had a problem. Despite consistent messaging harping on the importance of speed to care, our first med passes to new patients were slow, at least some of the time. I was new to the company enroll and thrilled the phone had started ringing with interesting cases like this one. But I remember this one in particular because it felt like we were starting from ground zero. We didn't even have a defined process, not across all 200 facilities at least, and we didn't have any common tools or data capture, so no easy way to collect or analyze performance across the portfolio. We didn't know the top reasons for going long or the top reasons for fast passes. We didn't even really know if this was a consistent problem across the enterprise. All we had was sporadic anecdotal evidence that some meds sometimes were being unacceptably delayed. Within a few minutes, it became clear that the only thing we were doing consistently is asking our staff to do it faster, which was proving to be about as ineffective as you might guess. Getting to dig into care-related issues like this one was a particularly exciting aspect of my job because as a non-clinician, it allowed me to use the power of process improvement to positively impact patients, not just business outcomes. In a case like this, where there is no clear process and no data to analyze, the solution is typically to start by exploring potential best and worst practices, clarify the new expectations, the steps sequence, the systems, and then coordinate the transformation, first through small experiments, and then by broader and broader means before helping the whole team, all teams in mass to master the new steps, sequence, and skills through repetition and, of course, continuous improvement. It's not rocket science, it's basic process improvement. Define it, do it, measure, and improve it. Fast forward to 2015, I was in a meeting with an energy executive and he was sharing feedback regarding a direct report he wanted me to coach. He said, I've been telling him for years now, he needs to be more strategic, stop being so tactical, delegate more, develop his people. But nothing changes. I was taking notes, but I really didn't need to. These remain the most common complaints I hear. Sure, there's the odd bully here or there, but this trio is far more pervasive. So much so, I'd be surprised if you weren't tackling at least one of these areas with a leader right now. In fact, the more leaders you lead, the higher the chances it's more than just one. Anyhow, I don't know what was so special about this time around. I don't know if it was his volume or the way he said it or what I'd had for breakfast. Who knows? But this time, it hit me like a sledgehammer as his words hung in the air. But nothing changes. In that moment, my lives as a process improvement expert and executive coach collided. My eyes were open, and once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. The obvious connection between these two cases. Leadership is a process. Action, not academics. Process improvements, not personality adjustments, are the key to developing yourself and others. And once you see it, once you see that, it will change the way you lead and how you coach your leaders forever. Hello, and welcome back to the Leadership SOPs podcast, where we help enterprise leaders and the leaders they lead make extraordinary leadership routine. I'm Ed Tyson, author of From Expert to Executive, Mastering the SOPs of Leading, and creator of the Leadership SOP's methodology, framework, and app. In today's episode, we are going to complete our three-part introduction to the purpose, work, and process of leading, establishing a common language and lens for every episode that follows. Why do we lead? In episode one, we posited that we lead in order to cultivate the communities of effort we require to pursue ambitions we could never achieve alone. In episode two, we differentiated the hard work of leading, structuring, operating, and perfecting communities of effort from the soft skills and the competencies that help us do it better. Yes, active listening, empathy, and emotional intelligence can all help us lead better, but only if deployed in the process of leading. And that's where we find ourselves today, making the case for the process of leading, the application of the science of process improvement to get your leaders leading more, more intentionally, more consistently, and better. Using it, process improvement, to drive an intentional leadership brand, increase personal proficiency and that mysterious quality we call feel, improve role clarity, collaboration, and trust, and simplify knowledge transfer and behavior change. With every single repetition, just like at the gym, if they get their reps in, they will grow stronger. And if you do it with them, it will click and spread faster than you could have ever imagined. But before I get over my skis here, is leadership a process? A process is a series of actions bound by an intended result. That's the definition. Plain and simple. To be a process, something must be more than one action, and they need to be bound by a common purpose. So as it relates to leadership, I guess I'd have to ask, what's the alternative? Can one lead without acting, without a common intent to a string of actions? To me, leading implies both. It is inherently active, inherently external rather than internal, because you cannot cultivate a community of effort using your thoughts and emotions. It takes social interactions to structure, operate, and perfect a community of effort. What we know, think, and feel informs our leading. These internal things, they inform it. They prepare us for our leading. And as the quality of this knowledge improves, our thoughts get better, our emotions improve, etc., so does our potential leadership, like the potential energy of an object, raised higher and higher above the ground. But it is not released. That energy is not released. Your leadership is not released until we act. What we could do, what we might do, and what we should do is theoretical, and neither good leadership nor bad leadership until we do it. In fact, the only time I can think of where inaction creeps close to leadership is when we skip a beat to provide room for others to play a note, allowing them to be part of the song. But that is less about inaction and more about inclusion, isn't it? When you take action A, communicate expectation B and coordinate contribution C, A, B, and C are the SOP. Leadership is a team sport where you're the player coach who defines, calls, and participates in the plays. Your SOPs don't just define your actions, they also establish the space for the participants and they coordinate their actions. And all of this unlocks an underutilized and practical path to performance improvement and the cultivation of the community of effort you need to succeed. Process improvement is performance improvement. All systems are perfectly designed to get the results they get, or so the saying goes. And if your team isn't motivated enough, for instance, right? They don't have the will, you have to ask yourself, what was your process to get the will, to help develop it? Who participated? And how does it need to change? If your team lacks the skills, the capability or the resources, what skills or capabilities do they need? What's that gap? And how are you going to get them? And what will you and they do when you do? Process times effort equals performance. We often discover problems by seeing them from the performance side of the equation. We see a result that is either too low or too important not to continuously improve. When we confront this situation by saying go faster or be more strategic, we are either blaming or abandoning our team, or both. Blaming their effort or abandoning the process and process improvement. In episode one, I went to great lengths to say the number one reason leaders don't engage in enterprise leadership across functions is because they resent having to do it. They see it as an unwelcome extra that isn't part and parcel to the job when they are hired to do it. And this abandonment I'm talking about also comes from a similar sense of resentment. Often, leaders don't want to lead their leaders. Sit with that for a second. And if you're rejecting it, think about this and see if this doesn't sound a little bit more familiar. Many leaders tell me they stop at things like be more strategic, because it's not their job to dig into the details and tell the leader exactly how to do the function. For some mysterious reason, they actually resent the idea that their leaders need to be led, that they need more information than that, that they need more assistance and more coaching than that. They thought they hired a mature professional. And it's frustrating and insulting to them both if they direct the process now. They are already supposed to know what to do. Why do I have to tell them what to do? It's almost comical if you like dark comedies, but it's true. I hear leaders talk this way all the time. But what should it look like when you do do it, when you do lean in? What does good process improvement look like? I think it looks something like structure, operate, perfect. These are the exact domains that I use to define the work of leading, but their flow, how they fit one after the other, is also a good process for process improvement. If we take a look at lean, Six Sigma, TQM, and virtually any other process improvement methodology, we'll see the same type of flow. Like I said earlier, define it, do it, measure, and improve it. They all emphasize defining the process in order to achieve consistency. But why? Because in the world of intentional process improvement, consistency is king. A lack of consistency, particularly amidst complexity, often makes improvement efforts futile, particularly when at scale. Maybe think about your golf swing. Perhaps you don't golf, but I certainly try. And I aim every time. But until my setup and my swing itself creates a consistent result, all that aiming is useless to my next shot. Because without a consistent swing, every shot introduces a host of new variables, variables I don't even know how to reproduce for better or for worse. So even when I hit a good one, I can't really expect the next one will follow suit because I don't know how to replicate it. Whereas once every drive is a 225-yard slice, now we're talking. Now a small number of changes will land me on the fairway, not just once, but every time. This is a basic tenet of process improvement, and it needs to make its way into your leadership. When it comes to your leadership, you cannot attempt wholesale changes each time and expect them to pay off. Additionally, if your leadership is contextual, it is also inherently chaotic, and that makes you hard to follow. Follow me? When you're consistent, you develop more and more confidence, competence, and feel each time you do it. And so does your team. Roles are clearer, collaboration is easier, and trust becomes shared. Nobody wants to be a robot. But if you keep changing as the chaos presses in, you'll be an amplifier, not an equalizer. And fail to establish the base from which all your subsequent improvements must flow. Consistency and its level repeatability are the prerequisites from which all intentional and effective improvement efforts spring. And it is from their union that scalability is born and enterprise leadership matures. All of this makes so much sense, maybe too much sense, and it's been around the basics of it for a long time, from Covey's seven habits of highly effective people to Stanier's The Coaching Habit. People have been preaching routine and consistency for a long time. So maybe the idea of leadership as a repetitive habit or process is about as disruptive and tired as it is laid out. Except in practice, something is terribly wrong here. From employees to managers to CEOs, no one is happy with the process or the performance. And yet the problem persists. Leaders want to get better at leading, but they don't really want to document their SOPs. That's the first step. Define it, structure it. They resist the idea of consistency and measurement as it relates to leadership. They don't want to define it, they don't want to measure themselves as they do it, and so they're not in a good position to improve it. And trainers and coaches, for their part, of course they want the leaders that they're serving to act differently, to improve. But they focus on insights because they aren't there when it's time to act. The solution seems painfully clear, but we just don't want to take the medicine. If we did take it, we wouldn't just do all of this in our heads and wing it. We would leverage the same kinds of enterprise tools for leadership that we use for managing, scaling, and improving every other critical organizational process. Our ERP, HRIS, sales, and other systems would prompt our SOPs. We would track our engagement, analyze other performance metrics, and know what works not just for us personally, but at scale. This is the world I'm trying to create, not because I want a system for every behavior, but because our current system sucks. What would I have said to that leader 15 years ago if he had admitted the medPass results were unacceptable, but he didn't feel like defining the process, measuring the milestones, and fighting for better results. Would we have allowed that? The answer is so clear, and not just to me. And that's why our employees are so frustrated. That's why our leaders feel unsupported. That's why the next generation doesn't even want the job. Define it, do it, measure, and improve it. That's the world I'm trying to create. In fact, that's what we're trying to do with the Leadership SOP's app. Are you with me? In that world, the Be More Strategic conversation starts with questions. Questions that help them explore how they think about their role, about the strategic elements of the role. How do they try to do it today? What are the barriers to getting to that work? Do they know what it is? Do they need help understanding it? Eventually, all this mutual discovery pivots then to clarifying the priorities, plans, process, and performance, helping you to align on and support the transformation that lies ahead, and laying the groundwork for mastery. Explore, clarify, transform, and master. This arc combines what we know about performance improvement and the human psychology of change. It supports both individual conversations and the entire arc of your coaching across many conversations. Imagine if this exchange, this explore, clarify, transform, and master exchange resulted in a new process you developed together, focused on the right work with the right people at the right time. Think of how much richer the after-action discussion would be. You could say things like, How did it feel? What was the result? Are there clear opportunities for improvement? At revolution one, they would be already more strategic than they had been. At revolution two, they would be getting more and more comfortable, and so would their team. At three, they would be starting to incorporate micro adjustments naturally. And by the time they got to the fourth or fifth revolution, they would be in an excellent position to start a more formalized diagnostic and improvement effort. It's not rocket science, it's process science, and without fail, leveraging it to develop, deploy, and improve standard operating procedures for structuring, operating, and perfecting communities of effort does lead to more leading, more intentionality, more consistency, enabling continuous improvement, and most importantly, simplifying knowledge transfer. Because the only thing easier than helping them through that explore, clarify, transform, and master conversation is pulling them through your process for doing it first. Don't have one? Don't worry, because that's exactly where we're going. Next on the Leadership SOPs podcast. Until then, subscribe, share, and review this episode. Ask your questions at askedtyson.com. Activate your leadership with the Leadership SOPs app. And of course, lead on.

Speaker 1 22:52

So that's it for today's episode of Leadership SOPs. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 value VIP Day with Ed Tyson's suff. Be sure to head on over to leadershipsopspodcast.com and pick up a free copy of that gift. And join us next time.